Images and graphics are useful tools for making a page look interesting, to illustrate points, and for design reasons such as breaking up large amounts of text.
However, you need to be sure that images you do use are of sufficient quality to add something to the page. You also need to be sure that their use is thought about carefully to make sure customers with accessibility issues aren’t disadvantaged if they can’t see them.
If we’re not careful about our use of images and pictures, pages can look amateurish or vary too much from one service to the next. This doesn’t present a professional, consistent, joined-up website to customers. If the page looks amateurish or poorly laid-out, no matter how good the content is, the information will not be credible or trustworthy to customers.
Do your images add anything to the page?
You should consider the following…
Is the picture strictly necessary?
It might seem desirable to illustrate a page about farming and agriculture with a picture of a tractor, but how does this help the understanding of the customer?
Does the image clash?
Images might clash with the scheme of the site as a whole, or even with other pictures on the same page. Don’t, for instance, mix representative clip-art with high resolution photographs.
Is it the right size?
Pictures that are much bigger than the amount of text on the page make the content difficult to read. Too many pictures also draw the eye away from important information, reduce the visual effect of including them at all, and makes pages crowded and messy.
Less is frequently more!
All content in this guide is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0, except where otherwise stated.